Contemporary history and fake news: our educational focus for 2023
We have started this new academic year with two exciting projects – yet another valuable experience and one more step in the educational work we have been developing in recent years.
The first one, Invisible Stories, funded by Erasmus+ program will be carried out in collaboration with partner organizations which we are also working with on another project, DIGHIST: the School with Class Foundation (Poland) and the King Baudouin Foundation (Belgium).
The aim of Invisible Stories to design and create a set of educational materials for secondary school teachers of History and Social Science. The main theme of the project is to shine a light on the processes of migration.
We want to show how migrations are an inherent part of the DNA of the European continent, since almost all Europeans are migrants or, if not, they’re descendants of migrants. We believe that the greatest challenges of our time – climate change or energy security – cannot be tackled from an exclusively national perspective, but it must be a global, universal goal for us all. Ultimately, with these materials we want to contribute to fostering critical thinking and the spirit of solidarity among Europe’s youth.
The collaborative work of the three entities will result in the creation, testing and finding a way to share a new approach to teaching about European migration. The Educational Toolbox for Migration, available in five languages, will consist of valuable content and innovative tools that hopefully will help reinforce students’ reflection around the topic which is usually underrepresented in education.
Against fake news, more innovation
The second project we are launching this fall is FAKE kNOw MORE. It is part of the European Media and Information Fund program and we are again joined by the School with Class Foundation (Poland), as the lead organization, and three other associations: AdFaber (Romania), FakeScape (Czech Republic) and Demagog (Poland).
We will work directly with educators from therapeutic centers, community centers, informal educational settings and schools, and we will provide them with training materials and tools to work with young people in vulnerable situations.
The main objective of this project is to raise awareness about how emotions, vocabulary and personal experience might create an internal bias that can make us more vulnerable to fake news.